An excessive dose of stupidity and an excessive reliance on kind hearts: that is how I reached Sambawan. I was in Ormoc, Leyte fooling students that they could take the ambiguous “travel writing” (in the Philippine context) as a career. Sleepless and restless, I answered several wise questions from students. One of them, do I make money from writing—travel writing specifically. There was that hackneyed anecdote on love. “Do you make money from love?” “No.” “Writing started like that. You do it as an act of unconditional love. But money comes in later.” I was half-asleep when I said that. […]